Development and Analysis of a New End-to-End QoS Mechanism for Mobile Networks

The proliferation of mobile devices over the past several years has created a whole new world of the Internet. The deluge of applications for every aspect of today’s life has raised the expectation of having ubiquitous connectivity, with a desired Quality of Service (QoS). However, it has violated the original Internet design which was not intended to support mobility, neither better than best-effort delivery. The problem of end-to-end QoS provisioning has been an active area of research for many years. While designed for fixed networks, the use of QoS protocols in IP-based mobile networks, where hosts dynamically change their point of attachments, imposes new challenges to be studied and analysed. Furthermore, a massive growth in the backbone network traffic with its highly unpredictable nature can cause bottlenecks in some links while others are under-utilised, and therefore, breaching the QoS provisioning commitments. The research presented here proposes a new end-to-end QoS mechanism for mobile networks. The scheme is composed of two different approaches for QoS provisioning in access and backbone networks. Firstly, a new scheme is proposed to minimise the signalling overhead, as well as how the QoS is interrupted at the time of handover. By virtue of a developed analytical framework and simulation scenario, the performance of the scheme is investigated thoroughly, emphasising on the figures of merits that affect the efficiency of using QoS signalling protocols in access networks. Secondly, a new QoS-aware routing mechanism is proposed for backbone networks, intending to minimise the congestion on the links while complying traffic requirement. The developed optimisation framework shows that the scheme can achieve near-optimal link utilisation, even under sudden traffic spikes, while complying with traffic needs.